AFGHANISTAN

Completing “the mission” before economic collapse overtakes us will eventually force our leaders to embrace the total war solution. They understand this; it has always been the plan. The cost of this solution will be paid in massive collateral death. It will be unavoidable in the end. Such a move will do serious damage to America’s image in the court of world opinion, seriously undermining any agreements or understandings based on trust.

On the eve of his meeting with David Cameron, the Prime Minister, Mr Zardari warned the international community that it had “lost the battle to win hearts and minds”.

In an interview with Le Monde, the French newspaper, on Tuesday Mr Zardari said the US and Nato-led coalition forces had "underestimated the situation on the ground" in Afghanistan, Pakistan's war-torn western neighbour.

"I believe that the international community, which Pakistan belongs to, is in the process of losing the war against the Taliban," he told the paper just hours before meeting Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, in Paris on Monday night.

"And that is, above all, because we have lost the battle for hearts and minds."

Who benefits from invading and occupying Iraq? Are Americans defending U.S. national security, or the security of our colonial outpost in the Arab World? This interview discusses the neoconservative Zionist cabal of the Bush administration who beat the drums for our illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

At midnight last night, the United States formally recorded its most lethal month in the seemingly endless war in Afghanistan. Some 66 servicemen died – at least two a day, every day, for 31 days. That was July. June was the deadliest for the coalition as a whole, and the first six months of 2010 were among the bloodiest for civilians since records began in 2007. What will August bring? Or September and October, months which, General David Petraeus, the US commander, has warned may well bring even more intense fighting? By that time, the war will have gone into its 10th year, and so will move towards, and beyond, the landmark when it will have lasted longer than the First and Second World Wars combined.

When President Obama announced his new war plan for Afghanistan last year, the centerpiece of the strategy — and a big part of the rationale for sending 30,000 additional troops — was to safeguard the Afghan people, provide them with a competent government and win their allegiance.

Eight months later, that counterinsurgency strategy has shown little success, as demonstrated by the flagging military and civilian operations in Marja and Kandahar and the spread of Taliban influence in other areas of the country.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Nine years on, the only way out will be through a negotiated settlement in Afghanistan.

At that point, the US will need to negotiate with whatever government is left in Kabul for the oil pipeline and mineral rights, which puts the US squarely where it was in August of 2001, when the Bush administration thought that the price being demanded by the Taliban was "too high", and that somehow, a war - and the cost in blood and money - would be "cheaper".

Most of the crooks and liars who form the political class today aren’t old enough to remember them, but there must be some institutional nostalgia for the days when America fielded vast armies of conscripts in a global struggle against tyranny. Congress must feel like fighting terrorism with a mere handful of volunteers is for military pikers. Iraq isn’t the kind of war that molds politicians into “great men.” And naturally, all politicians view themselves as great men.

What you need for real war, for firebombing cities, human wave attacks, and concentration camps—is to enslave pretty much everyone. You just can’t find enough volunteers for that kind of work.

The night Canadian Master Corporal Darrell Priede of Brantford died in Afghanistan, the Afghan war took a sudden dangerous new twist.

A stream of secret U.S. military intelligence reports released this week by the WikiLeaks website suggests the May 2007 death was the result of a Taliban attack with a heat-seeking, surface-to-air missile launched from the shoulder.

In all likelihood, the deadly weapon was provided by Iran.

Those two facts alone may be transforming the almost nine-year-old Afghan war.

Press clips gathered by the CIA and discovered in the National Archives’ stored CIA files point to an agency keenly interested in any leaks about the highly-classified CIA-Mossad program to establish Osama Bin Laden and the most radical elements of the Afghan Mujahidin as the primary leaders of the anti-Soviet rebels in the 1980s.

Following the attack, the Hebrew media made fun of Afghanis. The idea of freedom warriors walking through harsh mountainous terrain wearing old sandals while fighting one of the most sophisticated weapons on earth was presented as hilarious. A decade later Americans are tired and seeking for a honorable way to retreat. Old sandals have won the most sophisticated technology.

Western societies and states are moving inexorably toward conditions resembling barbarism; structural changes are reversing decades of social welfare and subjecting labor, natural resources and the wealth of nations to raw exploitation, pillage and plunder, driving living standards downward and provoking unprecedented levels of discontent.

We will proceed by outlining the economic political and military processes driving this process of decay and decomposition and follow with an account of the mass popular responses to their own deteriorating conditions. The deep structural changes accompanying the rise of barbarism become the basis for considering the prospects for socialism in the 21st century.

Editor – Opinion Maker
Pakistan Warned; Noose Being Tightened
“There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that should an attack against the United States be traced to be Pakistani it would have a very devastating impact on our relationship” – Hillary Clinton

War is highly corrosive to democratic values hollowing a nation’s wealth, its institutions, and its legislatures. Leaders who are supposed to lead are diminished to pathetic sycophants, pandering to the grand subterfuge. Where the instigators of this war, most prominently the USA, measure losses in terms of lives lost and money spent we are far from recognizing the damage done on the home front, not physical damage to cities and populations but the damage done to our democratic institutions, to the trust and the credibility of government, to the social contract with citizens. This despicable war has proven us to be our own worst enemy inflicting far greater damage on ourselves than any coterie of terrorists could do in ten life times.

Harper’s Ottawa is a blighted political landscape where not so honorable members loiter in the halls of power lacking courage and conviction, oblivious to their misdeeds.

It is unfortunate that the US was unable to use the window of opportunity that it had in the immediate aftermath of the removal of the Taleban Government in late 2001. It could have brought in a truly broad-based Afghan government and invested in the development of the country. Instead, it continued its military actions and brought corrupt and criminal elements into power in Kabul.
Before the West invaded Afghanistan my country had no suicide bombers, no jihad and no Talebanisation

There is now a general recognition that the war in Afghanistan cannot be won militarily. All the Taleban have to do to win is not to lose. The Americans won’t stay and everybody knows that.

US Congress rejects pullout of troops from Pakistan
By Anwar Iqbal
Thursday, 29 Jul, 2010
The measure, moved in the House of Representatives, was sponsored by two anti-war Republican congressmen — Dennis Kucinich (Ohio) and Ron Paul (Texas) — and was in reaction to reports that the US was running a secret war in Pakistan.
The lawmakers argued that any war effort not approved by Congress violated the War Powers Act. It was voted down 38-372. Thirty-two Democrats and six Republicans voted for the measure. Four congressmen voted “present”, three Democrats and one Republican.

Passenger List of ABQ-202
Wednesday, 28 Jul, 2010
A Pakistani man checks the lists of the passengers killed in a plane crash in The Margala Hills on the outskirts of Islamabad, at the Karachi airport on July 28, 2010. – AFP

In his bible for counterinsurgency, Field Manuel 3-24, General David Petraeus argues, “The cornerstone of any COIN effort is establishing security for the civilian population.” As one village elder who attended the Holbrooke meeting—incognito for fear of being recognized by the Taliban—told Green, “There is no security in Marjah.”

Nor in much of the rest of the country. The latest U.S. assessment found five out of 116 areas “secure,” and in 89 of the areas the government was “non-existent, dysfunctional or unproductive.”

Al Qaeda Doesn't Exist is the forthcoming documentary by The Corbett Report. It interrogates the theory that Al Qaeda is a centrally-operated terrorist organization run by Osama Bin Laden that perpetrated the attacks of 9/11. The documentary looks at Al Qaeda's roots, its ties to western intelligence agencies and the fictions that have been created to enhance its myth in the corporate-controlled media.

For years, the government has denied that depleted uranium (DU), a radioactive toxic waste left over from nuclear fission and added to munitions used in the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars, poisoned Iraqi civilians and veterans.

But a little-known 1993 Defense Department document written by then-Brigadier Gen. Eric Shinseki, now the secretary for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), shows that the Pentagon was concerned about DU contamination and the agency had ordered medical testing on all personnel that were exposed to the toxic substance.

The VA, however, never conducted the medical tests, which may have deprived hundreds of thousands of veterans from receiving medical care to treat cancer and other diseases that result from exposure to DU.

The Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center recently reported that ten years of data confirm that service members tend to have higher rates of certain cancers compared to civilians, according to the Army Times. While researchers suspected that service members are diagnosed with cancer more often and at a younger age because they have guaranteed access to health care and mandatory exams, the data does not explain the disparities in diagnosis among branches of the military. For example, the rate of lung cancer among sailors is twice that of other branches, while Marines have much lower cancer rates across the board.

The body of Jarod Newlove was recovered days after his companion, Justin McNeley, was confirmed dead following an ambush in the Taliban-infested Lowgar province.

Reporting from Camp Mike Spann, Afghanistan — The second of two American servicemen who disappeared last week in a Taliban-infested area south of the Afghan capital has been confirmed dead as well, a U.S. military official and Afghan authorities said Thursday.

The solution to our fiscal crisis, The Nation magazine editorializes, is to “end the wars, allow the tax cuts to expire and restore robust growth.” That’s because nearly the entire deficit this year and those projected at least for the short term are the result of “the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the recession,” the publication says in its lead editorial of August 2nd.

Yet, while the Obama administration has just pushed through $59 billion more to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan to intensify that war and for "nation-building", it has done way too little to help the States maintain needed jobs. “Spending on local projects plummets,” was a June 25th headline in “USA Today.”

Webmaster's Commentary:

Many observers have noted that we are already in the early stages of what future history will view as the third World War. I would add to that observation that the same future history will observe that we are already losing it.

That we have been put on a wartime economy is beyond question. Trillions of dollars are being spent on the machinery of death while support for life ebbs daily across this nation. As George Bernard Shaw observed, there is nothing in man;s industry but his greed and his sloth; his heart is in his weapons. Forget the speeches; what a government truly wants is what they will spend the peoples' money on.

So who is winning these wars, and who is losing? Victors are for history and white flags to determine, but I already see who is losing this war. We have fifty acres of tents down at the bottom of this hill filled with the victims of the3se lost wars. Although the rich rulers may never feel the sting, the fact is that every business that closes, every home that is foreclosed, every job that is lost is a victory for the enemy and a defeat for this nation. It does not matter who wears the ribbons and medals; those who pay the costs of wars look pretty much the same on all sides of the conflict, living looted lives while burying their children. Textbooks will point to one group and say they are the better for having achieved victory, while this other group are inferior because they were forced to surrender, but in truth the people on both sides of war are always the losers, while the powerful count the riches looted during the confusion and count themselves clever indeed for it all.

But the truth is that WW3 has already begun, and the USA has already lost it. Take a look around you at the shattered economy, the abandoned factories, the poverty, the decay, the homelessness, and tell me that it could be otherwise.

I asked the IPPNW member aboard the Mavi Marmora, how he, as a practicing psychiatrist, would evaluate the mental state of the Israeli leadership, he quipped that he was merely a psychotherapist, and did not deal with cases of grave psychosis.

How the papers got the leaks
July 28, 2010
Davies contacted people close to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and found out he was scheduled to speak before European parliament on June 21. Davies met with Assange and said he would offer a team of researchers to identify stories in the documents.
On June 22, during a six-hour coffee-soaked meeting in a Brussels café, Davies says Assange suggested another idea — that The Guardian and The New York Times be given an advance look at some information the site had on the Afghanistan war, with each paper publishing its own take on the documents. Within the next 24 rs, Davies says Assange told him Der Spiegel should be included as well.

In the words of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is credited with masterminding the 9/11 attacks, their purpose was to focus "the American people ... on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people …."

President Barack Obama's pick to lead the U.S. military command overseeing operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere said on Tuesday he wanted top leaders of two major insurgent groups designated as terrorists.

Webmaster's Commentary:

"I mean, just because we've stolen their country and blown up several hundred of their friends and families in drone attacks is no reason for them to hate us. They are being completely unreasonable!!!"

The Obama Administration has threatened to end billions of dollars in American aid to Pakistan if the Zardari government does not do something about claims that the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Agency has been backing the Taliban.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of this is that the threat seems to be the first fallout from the WikiLeaks release of some 92,000 Afghan War related US documents.

Webmaster's Commentary:

"Because, you know, all those civilian deaths are really no biog deal, right?" -- Official White Horse Souse

Though one would have expected that the massive release of some 92,000 classified documents Sunday underscoring just how poorly the war is going would have changed some minds, the Obama Administration has gotten its way once again, with the House of Representatives approving the $59 billion emergency funding bill to keep the war going by a 308-114 vote.

Buried among the 92,000 classified documents released Sunday by WikiLeaks is some intriguing evidence that the U.S. military in Afghanistan has adopted a PR strategy that got it into trouble in Iraq: paying local media outlets to run friendly stories.

Following up on reports emerging over the weekend, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s office is confirming that a NATO attack in Sangin District of the Helmand Province struck a houseload of civilians hiding from a nearby battle, and that at least 52 civilians were killed.

The tens of thousands of classified military documents posted on the Internet Sunday confirm what critics of the war in Afghanistan already knew or suspected: We are wading deeper into a long-running, morally ambiguous conflict that has virtually no chance of ending well.

According to an incident report filed by the U.S. military unit, 205TH RCAG (Regional Corps Advisory Group), four Canadian soldiers were killed and seven others and an interpreter were wounded on Sept. 3, 2006, when a jet dropped a bomb on a building they occupied during the second day of Operation MEDUSA.

The Canadian military reported at the time that the four soldiers died in battles with Taliban forces.

In the wasteful, failed war on drugs the hypocrisy of our government knows no bounds. We spend billions and billions of dollars to put lowly drug dealers and users in "for profit" jails, while our CIA, military, and large banks seem to be the real drug dealers. These institutions have a profit/funding motive not to end the insanity of prohibition. The photos below show your tax dollars hard at work:

How about an inquiry into the war crimes? How about an inquiry into just how we got tricked into this stupid war in the first place? How about an inquiry into why we don;t just call it quits and bring our kids home?

According to the Department of Defense, only 4000 Jews serve in the American military. Over 200,000 American Jews have been trained at US expense by the IDF in Israel but only a handful defend Israel in the current wars in the military of the country of their birth, the United States of America. 40% of the world’s Jews live in Israel. 40% of the world’s Jews live in the United States with 2.2 million residing in New York City alone. If any nation has been the homeland of the Jews, it has been the United States.

There are some problems with the claims coming out of the documents. That tabloid-esque story about Osama arranging a marriage seems like the US propagandizing its own troops. Second, whatever the Taliban are shooting down US aircraft with, they are NOT Stingers left over from Charlie Wilson's war, because even with proper storage the shelf life of a Stinger rocket motor is only ten years. After that cracks develop and anyone dumb enough to use one will probably fly a lot further than the Stinger itself.

Rangers, here is your task today. Please copy this article and post it everywhere you see the US Government whining about the release of the Afghanistan Logs. Let the world know that it isn't national security or honor that is the issue, but the drug profits.

“The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security ,” Jones declared in a statement released by the White House.

The Obama administration condemned the unprecedented leak of thousands of classified documents on the Afghanistan war, saying website Wikileaks.org "made no effort" to contact the federal government before releasing them.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Daniel Ellsberg did not contact the administration before releasing the Pentagon Papers. He would have been foolish to do so. The fact is that the US Government has started to act just like Israel. They wish to commit war crimes such as targeted assassinations and killing innocent civilians, but they do not wish their public image to suffer for it.

You need to read all these papers about the conduct of the war in Afghanistan, because you paid for all of this!

What is America doing in Iraq and Afghanistan? It’s called “nation building.” What business is it of America to be building other’s nations? It’s really none of their business. It’s nothing more than the arrogance of power.

U.S. special operations forces have targeted militants without trial, Afghans have been killed by accident, and U.S. officials have been infuriated by alleged Pakistani intelligence cooperation with the very insurgent groups bent on killing Americans.

Still, they also included unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings and covert operations against Taliban figures.

Assange told reporters in London that what's been reported so far on the leaked documents has "only scratched the surface" and said some 15,000 files on Afghanistan are still being vetted by his organization.

We hope the impact will lead to a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan and modern warfare in general. - Wikileaks

(SALEM, Ore.) – WikiLeaks has done it again; over 90,000 documents from the war in Afghanistan have been released to the public. Wikileaks called, The Afghan War Diary (AWD), “An extraordinary compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010.

“The reports, while written by soldiers and intelligence officers mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States military, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures, and related detail.”

Many of the wounded are innocent Afghan civilians whose neighborhoods have become battlefields. In fact, Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM) (an independent and impartial Afghan rights group) reports that 1,074 civilians were killed and over 1,500 were injured in the first six months of 2010.

More NATO troops will die in Afghanistan as violence mounts over the summer, but Washington's goal of turning the tide against the insurgency by year's end is within reach, the top U.S. military officer said on Sunday.

Paul J. Balles argues that the continued presence of 1,000 American military bases outside the USA nearly two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union is a symptom of the arrogance of power that threatens local communities and ultimately the USA itself.

”What is America doing in Iraq and Afghanistan? It’s called 'nation building'. What business is it of America to be building other’s nations? It's really none of their business. It's nothing more than the arrogance of power.”

Tim Coles takes us through 11 steps necessary to create a “terrorist state”. Using Yemen as a case study, he argues that these steps precisely match US and British policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran as well as Yemen to grow “very poisonous seeds”, some which have ripened while others are ripening.

Two American soldiers went missing after driving off their base in Kabul on Friday afternoon, and the Taliban later claimed to have captured them in eastern Afghanistan, NATO officials said Saturday, the same day five U.S. troops were killed in the south.

The international foreign ministers conference held in Kabul Tuesday formally endorsed President Hamid Karzai's proposed 2014 target for Afghan forces to assume the lead responsibility for the country's security, while acknowledging that the foreign occupation will continue indefinitely.

U.S. troop deaths have reached their highest levels of the nine-year war. Last month a record 60 Americans were killed in Afghanistan; the most recent fatalities bring the tally for July to more than 50.

James Fetzer interviewed me on his radio show and podcast, The Real Deal, in discussion of the evidence to prove beyond any doubt current US wars are tragic-comic unlawful; Orwellian in the distance between the disclosed and verifiable evidence and the law. The article with links of documentation is here to prove all claims for war were known lies as they were told, with this information now uncontroversial but corporate media lying in omission in their failure to announce this to the American public.

These lies that levied war on US soldiers are treason; with escalated war policy under President Obama that includes threat to attack Iran based on similar lies that preceded war with Iraq.

Consider a strange aspect of our wars since October 2001: they have yet to establish a bona fide American hero, a national household name. Two were actually "nominated" early by the Bush administration — Jessica Lynch, a 19-year-old private and clerk captured by the Iraqis in the early days of the American invasion and later "rescued" by Army Rangers and Navy Seals, and Pat Tillman, the former NFL safety who volunteered for service in the Army Rangers eight months after 9/11 and died under "enemy" gunfire in Afghanistan.

The irony here is that the decision to declare enemy fighters in Afghanistan as "unlawful enemy combatants" -- which is what, in turn, "justified" denial of Geneva Conventions protections for them (at least until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise) -- was grounded in the fact that they do not, as Mukasey put it, "wear uniforms, follow a recognized chain of command, carry their arms openly." That's what made them, in the U.S. lexicon, not only "unlawful combatants" but even Terrorists. But, of course, exactly the same is true for our countless private contractors who are acting as combatants for the U.S. in multiple parts of the world; as Priest and Arkin document, they are so numerous and unaccountably embedded in secret government functions that they are literally "countless"

Snopes.com, officially known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, has since its humble inception in 1995 come to be regarded as one of the most trusted debunkers of conspiracy theories on the internet. Described by one of its many fans – it apparently has over 6 million visitors per month – as “the grand-daddy of all fact-checking sites,” Snopes is downright cavalier, however, in its attitude to facts surrounding Israel’s role in the 9/11 attacks.

It may take decades before Afghanistan’s vast mineral wealth can start generating the big bucks. So in the meantime, the U.S. military is working to bolster another traditional Afghan industry: carpets.

The Pentagon and the Interior Department are about to issue a year-long, no-bid, $7 million contract to Adelphia, New Jersey’s Tremayne Consulting to turn Afghanistan’s storied, broken carpet business into an international powerhouse.

Perhaps the US should recognize that it has a second-rate military at phenomenal cost—an enormous, largely useless national codpiece. It is embarrassing. The Pentagon’s preferred enemies are lightly armed, poorly equipped peasants, which makes for a long war and thus hundreds of billions of dollars in juicy contracts for military industries. Yet the greatest military in history (ask it) gets run out of Southeast Asia, blown up and run out of Lebanon, shot down and run out of Somalia, with Afghanistan a disaster in progress and Iraq claimed as an American victory rather than Shiite.Do the aircraft carriers intimidate North Korea? No. Iran? No. China? No. For this, a trilliaon dollars a year?

The irony here is that the decision to declare enemy fighters in Afghanistan as "unlawful enemy combatants" -- which is what, in turn, "justified" denial of Geneva Conventions protections for them (at least until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise) -- was grounded in the fact that they do not, as Mukasey put it, "wear uniforms, follow a recognized chain of command, carry their arms openly." That's what made them, in the U.S. lexicon, not only "unlawful combatants" but even Terrorists. But, of course, exactly the same is true for our countless private contractors who are acting as combatants for the U.S. in multiple parts of the world; as Priest and Arkin document, they are so numerous and unaccountably embedded in secret government functions that they are literally "countless":

We are watching history in the making in Afghanistan; but it is history of a certain stamp – the slow-motion unraveling of a disaster. The international conference meeting in a palatial hall in Kabul has all the unreality of similar doomed assemblies in the past. Think of the States General of France in 1789, the Duma in Russia in 1905 – you get the picture. Here we have high-ranking international diplomats and foreign ministers, the supposed "movers and shakers" of the world, but they have encountered the immovable and the unshakeable: the victorious Taliban and the treacherous warlords of Afghanistan.

The replacement of the July 2011 drawdown date with a more speculative 2014 date is scarcely completed, and already that date too is being disavowed by NATO Secretary General and Afghan War enthusiast Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

In September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital, Iraq, had 170 new born babies, 24% of whom were dead within the first seven days, a staggering 75% of the dead babies were classified as deformed.

This can be compared with data from the month of August in 2002 where there were 530 new born babies of whom six were dead within the first seven days and only one birth defect was reported.

Doctors in Fallujah have specifically pointed out that not only are they witnessing unprecedented numbers of birth defects but what is more alarming is: "a significant number of babies that do survive begin to develop severe disabilities at a later stage."

Maidhc O'Cathail
Snopes purports to debunk a claim that “four thousand Israelis employed by companies housed in the World Trade Center stayed home from work on September 11, warned in advance of the impending attack on the World Trade Center.”

US President Barack Obama told that US will continue it's fight against the terrorist group Taliban, who killed innocent civilians in the US and the UK.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Prove it, President Pussy.

Because your word is no longer sufficient, not after breaking your campaign promise to end the wars as your first act in office.

Second, your tough talk about about avenging the deaths of Americans is undermined by the fact that Israel attacked a US-flagged ship and American citizens in international waters, and you ... did ... absolutely ... nothing ... about ... it!So kindly can the bovine excrement, President Pussy, because we all know the real reason you are prolonging the war in Afghanistan.

On the eve of the latest policy conference, top US and NATO officials have arrived in Kabul to pledge their support to the continuation of the Afghan War, with promises of an unending commitment to propping up the Karzai government going forward.

Do we really think that those children who survive and reach adulthood will be thankful to the western countries? Do we really think that Afghanistan will not become the greatest reserve of desperate people without a real future? And where there is no future, you need hope; hope that, as we know, radical interpretations of religion can easily offer. Our attempt to achieve security through bombs and useless killing today will be the reason for our continued insecurity tomorrow.

9/11 was like Pearl Harbor to America, uniting many, awakening bitter skepticism in a few. Where Pearl Harbor began America’s official role in crushing the Fascist juggernaut that threatened to dominate the world, 9/11 had quite the opposite effect. America’s response to 9/11 was oppression at home and a tirade of frenzied phobic reactions around the world. No American institution suffered more than the military. The team of Cheney and Rumsfeld, together since the disastrous Nixon years, began a process of purging America’s military of talent and leadership, instead building a force to serve a sinister agenda of religious heresy and extremist politics.

'Scary' growth of gangs in war zones
Chicago cop who served in Afghanistan and Iraq has warning: Gang members are coming home with military training
July 18, 2010
BY FRANK MAIN Staff Reporter
Stoleson, who stressed he was not speaking for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections or the Army, said it appears the problem is worse than ever. He warned that soldiers who return to gang life back home are especially dangerous because they know military tactics that they can use against the police and the public -- as a Marine did in 2005 when he killed a police officer and wounded three others in a California ambush.
"Gang members are coming home now with one or two tours," he said. "Some were on the field of battle."

While in Israeli custody I, along with everyone else was subjected to endless abuse and flagrant acts of disrespect. Women and elderly were physically and mentally assaulted. Access to food and water and toilets was denied. Dogs were used against us, we ourselves were treated like dogs.

The southern city of Kandahar, the last Afghan territory to be handed over by the British in 1830, was also known as the center of greatest resistance to the Russian occupation in the 1980’s. Today it measures as the epicenter of intense political competition, drug trafficking and an operational nightmare for a U.S. led counterinsurgency campaign; once again proving its historic destiny as a make-or-break location for another Afghan war.

Ken O'Keefe
My 1984 reality is culminating with the United States and Israeli Governments treating me and/or charging me with being a “terrorist”. Americans worry not, you can sleep better at night knowing your “homeland” is being defended from the likes of me. And Israel, rest easy as well, it’s Ken O’Keefe and his Arab collaborators who are in the Mossad crosshairs.

President Obama and his military team recognize that it is less damaging at home, where there is almost no support for this endless occupation, to foment civil war in Afghanistan and pay desperate Afghans to slaughter each other as a means of reducing U.S. casualties.

U.S. taxpayers who are experiencing devastating cuts in state and local budgets, layoffs of municipal workers, soaring tuition hikes in public colleges—all because of budget shortfalls—will see billions of their tax dollars go to fund the occupation of Afghanistan and pay the salaries of poor Afghans so that they can shoot other poor Afghans.

Webmaster's Commentary:

This is so sickly immoral, I just don't know where to start.

This war in Afghanistan has absolutely nothing to do with the safety and security of this country; it has everything to do with potential private profit from the installation of pipelines with which to control Eurasian oil, from the drug trade, and from unexploited mineral deposits.

For the last decade, America has been shuffling its entire military, including hundreds of thousands of private contractors, in and out of the Middle East on little more than a “snipe hunt.” Time for a reality check. Iraq never attacked the US. Reports say Al Qaeda may have fewer than 30 men in Afghanistan.

The Taliban has been asking for a cease fire for months. Turkey and Brazil negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran ending any possible threat, one we strangely, very strangely ignored. “Thermo-nuclear Israel’s” continual whining and manipulation is wearing thin. America’s economy, her Army and her suffering veterans demand an end to our Bush era phony war.

Where the US claims its presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is only temporary the massive infrastructures established in these countries in the form of military bases belies this claim. They are not dispensing “Enduring Freedom” but an enduring presence and Afghanistan and Iraq are only the most recent franchises in a global network of over 700 US military bases.

Imperialism is a very expensive game and has left America the most indebted country in the world. It is fighting foreign wars with borrowed money on borrowed time. It then becomes necessary to defray the costs of this cretinous extravagance by coercing allies, namely NATO, into being the whores of US imperialism all too willing to cough up cash and lives in a sorely corrupted cause for despicable motives.

...Huge amounts of money [are] regularly being secreted out of Afghanistan by plane in boxes and suitcases. According to some estimates, since 2007, at least $3 billion (€2.4 billion) in cash has left the country in this way. The preferred destination for these funds is Dubai, the tax haven in the Persian Gulf. And, given the fact that Afghanistan's total GDP amounts to the equivalent of $13.5 billion, there is no way that the funds involved in this exodus are merely the proceeds of legal business transactions...

Before a July 20th donors conference in Kabul, US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, announces the Afghan war cannot be won militarily.

"As you said, Mr. Chairman, there is no military solution here, so as General Petraeus and General McChrystal said, you cannot win this war by killing every member of Taliban," Holbrooke, told US senators on Wednesday, Press TV reported.

Despite the high-profile spin in Washington and Kabul about progress made in Afghanistan, the Afghan people have only witnessed and suffered an intensifying armed conflict over the past six months. Contrary to President Barrack Obama’s promise that the deployment of additional 30,000 US forces to the country would "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" Taliban insurgents and their al-Qaeda allies in the region, the insurgency has become more resilient, multi-structured and deadly.

The British government’s decision to withdraw troops from Sangin in Helmand province marks a watershed in the relentless conflict in Afghanistan. The military mission has been very costly for the United Kingdom, with a third of the total casualties sustained in one district alone. More than a hundred lives of soldiers lost and many more wounded coming home is a sign of how difficult the mission has been. In a classic display of guerrilla tactics of asymmetrical warfare, the armed opposition has refused to fight a modern army equipped with high-tech weaponry on its enemy’s terms. Instead, the insurgents have fought on their terms, using rudimentary explosive devices and small weapons with devastating effect. Reaction of Afghans in Sangin will shock many in Britain.

Depending on just what you counted, there were anywhere from 700 to perhaps 1,200 or more U.S. bases, micro to macro, acknowledged and unacknowledged, around the globe. Meanwhile, the Pentagon was pouring money into the wildest blue-skies thinking at its advanced research arm, DARPA, whose budget grew by 50%. Through DARPA, well-funded scientists experimented with various ways to fight sci-fi-style wars in the near and distant future (at a moment when no one was ready to put significant government money into blue-skies thinking about, for instance, how to improve the education of young Americans).

Good news, though: Construction of Kabul's 900,000-square-foot Police Training Center is "progressing according to plan." After $27 billion spent, Afghan police are still "illiterate, corrupt, and trigger-happy," their instructors lament, but a spiffy new training complex can't hurt.

Enough. With American casualties mounting, it's clearer than ever that "Operation Enduring Freedom" has become a sickening waste of blood and treasure.

The attacker escaped, and the motive for the assault in Helmand province is unknown. The incident could be deeply embarrassing for Kabul and Washington, renewing concerns about the infiltration of Taliban militants or sympathizers into Afghan security forces.

The truth here, sadly, is that the US and NATO military are here for three reasons, all of them having to do with private profit, and none of them having to do with the safety or security of the US or NATO countries.

They are:

1. The installation of oil pipelines with which to control Eurasian oil (mission singularly unaccomplished here).

2. The control of the drug trade from which so many profit so handsomely (mission very much accomplished here, to the point that the Russian government is openly complaining about the cheap heroin flooding their country).

3. The control of Afghanistan's vast mineral wealth (mission bungled severely, in light of the fact that, as reported at:

So this means that every single US and NATO soldier who has been died or maimed for life in this meatgrinder has had this happen not to defend the security of their respective countries, but to extract wealth for private corporations from Afghanistan.

All the families and friends who mourn their dead, and grieve for those who have been maimed for life need to understand just why their loved ones have had this happen to them.

The Guantanamo Files: The Story of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison. In Andy Worthington’s The Guantanamo Files, the whole story of the Cuban camp emerges as a ghastly experiment in which the terrorist suspects became guinea pigs in a vast experiment of methods to crack the human soul. [This] is a powerful, essential and long-overdue piece of research, providing the first real Who’s Who of those held at the Cuban base. –Stephen Grey, New Statesman

Some Pakistani officials are convinced that the United States’ ongoing military surge against the Taliban in Afghanistan is doomed, and that the diminishing western appetite for the war will position it as the key to a future political settlement, Pakistani analysts said.

Pakistan’s foreign policy leaders, notably its powerful army chief, consider the June 23 exit of Gen Stanley McChrystal as the commander of US forces in Afghanistan as indicative of a growing acceptance by the Obama administration that the conflict cannot be settled by force, they said.

Webmaster's Commentary:

This was an unwinnable war from the beginning, with never enough military resources on the ground to create anything that would ever look like a military victory to a sensible human being.

At the end of the day, and after almost 9 years of blood and money spent, the US and NATO need to declare victory, bring their troops home, and negotiate with whatever government is left standing in Kabul for the oil pipeline rights.

The United States may still be in the Afghanistan and Iraq region for another ten years, according to Gen. George Casey.

“The types of conflict that we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I think are likely to be fighting here for a decade or so, are focused on the people,” Casey, the army's Chief of Staff, said Friday night at the Aspen Institute's Ideas Festival.

“We are not going to succeed in either place by military means alone. You are only going to succeed when the people perceive there is a government represented by their interests, when there is an economy that can give them a job to support their families, when there are educational systems that can educate their family. All those things are essential to the long term success of the military operation.”

Webmaster's Commentary:

Memo to Gen. George Casey: the US shouldn't be in either Iraq or Afghanistan for another 10 seconds, let alone 10 years!

We do not have the person power in terms of troops with which to manage these wars without reinstituting a draft, and the borrowing costs for these immoral and illegal wars without end will bankrupt this country.

President Obama may lack the nerve to stare down Liz Cheney or Bibi Netanyahu, but no one can deny that our commander in chief has the guts to take on a child soldier. Come August, a military commission in Guantánamo will try Omar Khadr, a Canadian national captured outside Kabul in 2002, when he was just 15 years old. This will be only the third Gitmo trial and the Obama administration’s first, and there won’t be anything kinder and gentler about it.

June’s devastating record death toll in Afghanistan, 103 NATO troops including 61 Americans, may just be the tip of the iceberg, according to second in command Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez.

Lt. Gen. Rodriguez’ comments suggest the toll is the new normal, and furthermore he cautions against drawing any conclusions about how badly the war is going based on the massive death tolls. “This is a contest of wills,” he insisted, adding that there was an “upward trajectory in the war.

Webmaster's Commentary:

I am waiting for the "body count" moments to begin on the corporate news regarding Afghanistan soon, just as happened in the unwinnable, immoral, and illegal war against North Vietnam.

Come August, a military commission in Guantánamo will try Omar Khadr, a Canadian national captured outside Kabul in 2002. He was a boy, aged 15 then. Now a burly, bearded 23-year-old who has spent one-third of his life at Guantanamo. He bears scant resemblance to the fresh-faced, teen, who had survived multiple gunshots wounds and several major surgeries. There must be some reason why this lad did not die from his wounds. A shotgun blast to the back with sufficient force to exit the chest is a pretty fatal event. Perhaps the Power that kept him alive this long will reveal His purpose in time.

Gen. Mattis has the same habit of speaking his mind as McCrystal. Eric Garris writes today that Mattis was quoted back in 2005 as saying he finds pleasure in shooting and killing people in Afghanistan. “Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot,” Mattis said, prompting laughter from some military members in the audience, CNN reported on February 4, 2005. “It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.” Mattis, who commanded Marine expeditions in Afghanistan and Iraq, made the comments during a panel discussion in San Diego, California.

Though it is almost unfathomable that it is even possible given how widespread corruption was in 2007, a recent survey by the Integrity Watch Afghanistan (IWA) organization shows that the level of corruption in Afghanistan has doubled since then.

Accused war-criminal Omar Khadr has fired his American lawyers less than a week before his military-commission pre-trial hearings are slated to resume in Guantanamo Bay, one of his despondent attorneys said Wednesday.

Khadr, via a motion terminating his U.S. counsel and filed by his lawyers with the commission, said that he would either represent himself or boycott his trial.

"We have worked our hearts out on the case and were just eagerly looking forward to what we had planned to do," one of the lawyers, Barry Coburn, told The Canadian Press.

Prosecutors allege Khadr threw a hand grenade that killed Sgt. Chris Speer in Afghanistan in July 2002 when he was 15 years old. He faces a maximum life sentence on conviction.

General Dannatt talked of past failures and future pitfalls. "The intention when we went into southern Afghanistan was to try to get the country on its feet economically," he said. "We all know it didn't turn out that way. We spread our small resources thinly and that inevitably made the small number of British soldiers like flies in a honey pot. We got into this cycle of fighting.

"We have got to make sure that the general public in this country understand why we are in Afghanistan, what we are doing, and that the cost – while very, very tough for the families who lose loved ones – is worth the price we are paying. I don't want to see the figures get to 400 but realistically they probably will."

Webmaster's Commentary:

Memo to General Dannatt: at least, have the moral decency and courage to tell the parents and friends of those who have fallen, or have been maimed for life, the truth.

The UK, the US, and NATO are in Afghanistan for potential profit from drugs, minerals, and the oil pipelines: this is why the UK's kids have been fighting, getting maimed, and dying.

This war has nothing to do with the safety or security of the US or the UK: it is simply a war, ultimately, for private profit.

Aerial bombardment, a centerpiece of the US military effort in Afghanistan, has had a devastating impact on civilians there. Along with Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents and suicide bombers, who have recently escalated their slaughter of the Afghan population, US and North Atlantic Treaty (NATO) aircraft have for years inflicted a horrific toll on innocent villagers.

That implied that the US investigators would finally do what they had failed to do in an earlier investigation - interview the eyewitnesses. But three eyewitnesses who had claimed to see US troops digging bullets of the bodies of three women told Inter Press Service (IPS) they were never contacted by US investigators.

Michael Kinsley famously defined a gaffe as “when a politician inadvertently tells the truth.” That being the case, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele’s comment that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable definitely qualifies as a gaffe.

Iraq is America’s Gaza and, like Gaza, it cries for justice to a world which would rather ignore its plight as well as America and Great Britain’s role in this murderous error of judgement . Our karmic debt, like Israels with Gaza , is immeasurable:

Yes, we needed economists to tell us this. A new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds “strong evidence for a revenge effect” when examining the relationship between civilian casualties caused by the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan and radicalization after such incidents occur. The paper even estimates of how many insurgent attacks to expect after each civilian death. Those findings, however intuitive, might resolve an internal military debate about the counter-productivity of civilian casualties — and possibly fuel calls for withdrawal.

State Department budgets show that since 2008, Israel's place in U.S. foreign spending has remained undiminished. The fiscal year 2011 budget contains a proposed $3 billion for Israel. All of this money is appropriated for foreign military financing, a program that helps foreign countries to purchase weapons and defense equipment produced in the United States., as well as military training. This $3 billion comprises 42 percent of the total assistance to the Near East region.

Inside reports have it that Afghan President Hamid Karzai, thefraudulent head of state of the second most corrupt country in the world, has “lost his confidence in the capability of either the coalition or his own government to protect this country.” That’s probably why he’s told us to bugger off and is looking to strike his own deal with the Taliban and arch-rival country Pakistan.

Some readers think I exaggerate the influence of the lobby. I don’t — I used to work at AIPAC and on its favorite stomping ground, Capitol Hill. The latest evidence of the fear and trembling produced by the Israel lobby was evidenced last week when it was revealed that General David Petraeus was upset and worried by a column I wrote in March.

The old adage “politics stops at the water’s edge” does not apply to the Middle East.

When it comes to all matters relating to Israel, foreign policy is politics. It is absolutely impossible to imagine US policy toward Israel not being intertwined with politics and political fund-raising.

NATO mistakenly killed five of its Afghan army allies in an airstrike Wednesday while they were attacking insurgents in the country's east, officials said.

Three American soldiers were also reported killed Wednesday in a roadside bomb in the south.

An Afghan defence official condemned the latest "friendly fire" deaths, which came at a time when international troops are trying to improve co-ordination with Afghan security forces in hopes of handing over more responsibility for security to them nearly nine years into the war.

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That's a great way to gain their confidence.
NATO = North Atlantic Terrorist Organization

While Obama is often portrayed as a political neophyte finding himself confronting situations that are way over his head, his choice of General David H. Petraeus to replace General Stanley A. McChrystal was in some ways a masterful political stroke, though it does not seem to have achieved all that might have been intended.

A force of about 700 U.S. and Afghan troops launched a major assault along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan in an attempt to destroy a growing insurgent haven and blunt rising violence in the area, senior Army officials said Monday.

Our petulant president’s ego can’t handle a general letting off steam. Neither can any of the spoiled children who comprise “our” government in DC, the capital of the “superpower.”

Generals have to fight wars that civilians start, either from the incompetence of their diplomacy or the arrogance of their hubris. Generals have to get young troops killed because of the stupidity or ambition or corruption of civilian government officials.

All McChrystal did was to let off steam. A real president would have realized that and let it go.

Don’t get me wrong. McChrystal is a militarist, and I am pleased to see him gone.

All those facts are now known to be false. Yet Americans were deceived to do what? Believe. Ground Zero of the True Believers was Washington, DC where those sworn to protect us instead took us to war in Iraq—relying on false beliefs.